In recent years, the explosive growth in printers and copier installations, combined with growth in the usage, has created a huge demand for media substrate, such as paper sheet. In addition, in relation with such usage, many paper sheet documents are promptly discarded after being read. Therefore, although paper is inexpensive, the quantity of discarded paper documents is enormous, and the disposal of these documents raises significant cost and environmental issues. Nowadays, it has, thus, become a priority to reuse and recycle such used media.
Typically, used media such as printed matter, copied papers or facsimiled papers are rarely reused in offices. Indeed, though part of them are collected and processed to recycled papers, most of them are incinerated because of private matters recorded therein. Furthermore, recycling of paper sheets, once printed by a printer or by a copying machine, is expensive due to enormous economical and environmental costs of collecting and transporting the used paper to recycling points, further compounded by large amounts of bleaching agent, water and electrical power needed for recycling.
Therefore, the reuse of the same papers in offices is often desirable. In view of meeting such objective, one of the options is to have a process which enables the images and, more generally the ink composition, to disappear or to be easily removed from the printed media. Accordingly, there is a continuing desire for providing a process for removing ink from printed substrate.